


Kick the Generator

by Orockthro



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon levels of violence, Dystopia, F/F, M/M, Post Season 2, cyberpunk elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-13 22:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What do you think will happen? If we can’t--” Words fail him, and he settles for a sigh where ‘fix it’ should sit.</p><p>He can’t see John’s eyes, only his mouth as his teeth gleam in the low light. “Disorganization, food shortages, lack of communication. Alone, I think people could weather the storm. But with the military occupation? It will be a warzone.”</p><p>(Or, a post Season 2 dystopia. The gang tries to carry on. Romance is light, dystopia is heavy, there are some cyber punk elements.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am incredibly lucky. I had (have!) so many people helping me on this fic, it's not even funny. All of you are amazing, extra shout outs to Kira, who held my hand in the beginning, and Cortue, who held my hand at the end. Errors are due to my own impatience.  
> This fic ate my soul and spit me out again. I hope people enjoy it.

They stay in the library after it happens. Its abandoned lower floors and the single staircase that leads up to their base of operations makes it a defendable position, John tells him in hushed tones as they listen to the chaos outside. Harold sees the cock of his head and is half sure he’s lying, but the comfort of the library keeps him from questioning it. It’s a gift.

“Shaw’s getting more water. She should be back soon,” John tells him. She’d found them almost immediately after it happened. Whereas Harold is crippled by the loss of the machine, by the loss of his computers and phones and radios, Shaw thrives in the chaos. She won’t stay with them long. She isn’t like John, doesn’t have a reason to. She’ll stay just long enough to recoup and hatch a plan.

The sky lit up in a burst of light, the power grid crashed, and anything with an electrical component is now just a useless hunk of plastic and metal. The army rolled in just before it happened. Their tanks are useless now, as fried as everything else, but they form part of the blockade that lines the city and keeps people in as much as it does people out. John barricaded them in the library when the riots started, and he and Ms. Shaw took to thieving supplies in the night.

“They’re salting the earth,” John says after Harold’s computers burst and the the cars stall on the roads and people with pacemakers drop. John counts the grenades they have, the packages of ramen, the butane camp stove cartridges, and the iodine tablets for purifying water. He’s calm. Harold isn’t sure if it’s because he’s been in situations like this before (and he has) or if it’s because he knows exactly how many calories panicking will waste. “Preventing enemies from providing for themselves. The Romans did it with crop fields.”

They don’t know who is responsible, or even how far the damage goes. Manhattan is a sea of gangs and riots and soldiers, but John hasn’t been able to get past the military blockade to see on the other side. No one is claiming the attack, but even if they did, he isn’t sure they’d have any way of knowing. Harold’s fingers itch to scour the web, to hunt down microscopic hints from missile launches and chat logs, but there’s nothing he can do.  He’s next to useless now without his computers. He knows it was a non nuclear electromagnetic pulse simply because of its effects, but beyond that, nothing. They desperately need information, and he finds himself relegated to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. He keeps record of what they do know on the backs of library catalogue cards and pins them to the board that used to hold the faces of the Irrelevants.

It’s grows dark quickly in the library without the overhead lighting. They have candles but they’re conserving them, steeling themselves for the long haul. The moon is full and rising, and he can see Reese’s face outlined by the window. Neither of them want to give in to sleep just yet.

“What do you think will happen? If we can’t--” Words fail him, and he settles for a sigh where ‘fix it’ should sit.

He can’t see John’s eyes, only his mouth as his teeth gleam in the low light. “Disorganization, food shortages, lack of communication. Alone, I think people could weather the storm. But with the military occupation? It will be a warzone.”

 

Days later, when gunshots sound through the streets in a never ending staccato, he snakes a hand around John’s elbow and begs him to find Grace. “Please, Mr. Reese?” He’s lost without his computers. They’re just hunks of plastic and metal, fried useless when the power surge rushed through the city, but he hasn’t removed them from his desk. They sit there like grave markers.

“Of course, Finch,” John says, and he disappears down the stairs into the black.

John is gone for over a day. Shaw is surprisingly compassionate during the long night, makes sure Bear unleashes his energy running around the lower levels of the library and not on him.

“I’m sure you have questions, Ms. Shaw,” he gives her in return.

She snorts. She’s taken up John’s customary position peering out the window near his workstation, shoulder against the frame. It’s dawn now, and there’s still no sign of Reese. “If I needed answers to do a job, I would have been a really bad spy.” But she must see the opportunity in his offer, because she follows the brush-off with a real question. He thinks it will be about the army’s unyielding control over the now-dark New York, about their plan of attack in surviving this, but it isn’t.

“This Grace who John’s risking his neck to get - is she worth it?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t hesitate.

“Alright then.”

She pulls away from the window to sharpen a long knife she produces from somewhere on her person. She has more today than yesterday, and he’s not sure where the blades come from. They’re hunting knives, killing knives, and she hides a few through the library, but most she keeps in a canvas bag by the door. She makes no secret that she’ll leave them at some point. That she’s stayed with them this long unsettles him.

“She thinks you’re dead, right?” He doesn’t expect her to speak again, but Shaw is constantly surprising him.

He is pulling wiring away from his computers, stripping the plastic away from the metal, when she asks. The chance of reinstituting the power grid is slim, but if they are to restore power, they will need whatever components they can get. The task of separating the fried elements that were connected to the power grid when it blew from those few that are intact is long and arduous. His hands hover over a cord. “I beg your pardon?”

“I know your type. You protect people by distancing yourself. It’s a common technique.” A stupid technique, her tone of voice suggests.

He runs a finger down the length of extension cord he’s stripping. The three wires inside gleam, shiny and useless. “Yes, Ms. Shaw. She thinks I’m dead.”

“And John’s bringing her here. How’s that gonna go down, huh?”

He drops the arm with the box cutter, half in exasperation, half in the bone weary exhaustion that has been descending over him since the EMPs. His back aches, more than usual, and he resists the urge to press a hand to the nape of his neck. The discomfort radiates through his jaw. “I don’t know, Ms. Shaw. Badly I presume.”

 

John comes in near noon and knocks on the tin can they’ve strung down the staircase banister in tap code. Shaw still has her knives out and waits until she can see his tall form before letting Harold out from behind the corner. Bear has his head up and his tail wagging before John even gets to the top of the stairs.

As much as it pleases Harold to see John safely back in the library where he belongs, he’s unable to tear his eyes from the woman behind him. She’s as radiant as he remembers. She makes it to the top of the staircase before she sees him and blanches. She stares at him, frozen.

“You were telling the truth,” she says to John, and he sees him nod from the corner of his vision, but he can’t take his eyes off her. She’s pale and her voice is flat. She’s in shock.

He’s walking towards her with his arms extended before he realizes his body is moving, and Grace folds into him, neatly and completely. They used to fit together perfectly, coming together like pieces of a puzzle. She’s crying and his collar is growing damp, but the feeling of her arms around him is so familiar it’s painful.

She keeps one arm around his shoulders and beats a fist against his chest. It stings, but it doesn’t hurt as much as watching her cry.

“I buried you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Grace.”

John leaves, pulls Shaw with him into the back section of the library, and Bear follows. They’re alone now, but Grace doesn’t pull away except to tilt her head back and stare at him. Her eyes are red and her mouth is thin. The three years since he’s seen her up close have added minute lines around her mouth and eyes, a touch of gray beneath her bright red hair, but she looks so much the same it leaves him breathless.

“Why?”

It catches him. He expects her to ask how. He tells her everything, about Nathan, about the machine, about the bomb on the ferry. And he tells her about the Irrelevant list, and Decima, and John. “I wish I hadn’t,” he says, “I wish I’d found you afterwards instead. We could have run away from it all.”

Grace bites her lips. It’s a habit so natural and old it hurts to watch. She bit her lip when he proposed to her, too. “No, no you don’t, Harold. If you’d done that, then all those people would never have been saved.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“We had four years together, and they were wonderful years. But I need time to process this. All of this.” She’s still pale, but she’s stopped crying. Her hands are shaking. They’re on the floor now, like children. She sits with her legs crossed and his own are stretched out straight between them.

“Was any of it real?”

The Harold that brought her flowers, knew her favorite brand of chocolate, who loved to watch her paint, was a relic of a half-remembered self. He thinks of the not-lies, the carefully manicured silences that punctuated their relationship. “I wanted it to be,” he says, even though it burns to say.

Her voice is strong and the wavers are from emotion, not hesitance. “Things can’t ever go back to the way they were. I never asked you to tell me everything about your life, Harold. I loved you. But you made me burry an empty coffin. I can’t forgive you yet.”

His heart doesn’t break because it broke years ago. “Will you stay here? With us?”

“Do you want me to?”

He thinks about the army and the automatic machine guns outside, about the food shortages and the violence still on the horizon. “Yes.”

She takes his hand and presses it against her face, and he feels the wet of her tears. “Then I will.”

John finds him later, after Grace has left to settle into a corner of the library for the night, and helps him to his feet. “Everything alright, Harold?”

He lets John’s body heat warm him, the hand on Harold’s elbow a comfort in so many ways. He leans in. His legs are shaking more than they should be and the ache in his neck, above the pins and around something older, is growing worse. The world outside of the library hums with violence and fear, audible even through the thick stone.

“I don’t know, Mr. Reese.”


	2. Chapter 2

As far as end-of-the-worlds go, Shaw thinks it could be a lot worse. She’d gone to Reese and Finch because they’d had weapons and, more importantly, information. Turned out they were short on both, but she stayed anyway. First, because there hadn’t been a plan, and then as the days eked on, because it felt right. She hasn’t had a team since Cole, and the knowledge that Reese has her back is still a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. She still keeps her weapons and three days of food and water in pack by the door, but every morning she walks past it and doesn’t pick it up.

Grace stays with them after John brings her in. She’s useless with a gun and a knife, even hesitant with the telescoping baton. She’s a civilian, worse yet an old romance, and she represents a potential fission point in their group dynamics. But Grace turns out to have skills the three of them lack. She can walk outside after the army sweeps through, smile, and people will hand her food, hug her, and give her antibiotics. People will hand Reese water, they’ll offer a handshake to Finch, but they’ll run fast and far from Shaw.

She doesn’t splinter them, and Shaw finds herself drawn to her. She’s a breath of air, unexpected and sweet and different. Shaw teaches her tap code, shows her how to stand upwind when using mace, and how to spot a man hiding a gun. Grace shows her how to smile and how to trace silhouettes by candle light when it’s too dark to do anything else. It almost feels like it’s not the end of the world at all.

 

Shaw finds Grace crying in a pile of moldy books at the bottom of the stairs. She doesn’t just turn on her heel and walk away like she would for anyone else.

“I’m shit at this,” she says, and she slides down next to Grace. The smell of dog piss is rank, but the other woman doesn’t seem to care, so Shaw ignores it too. She’s acutely aware that their location is the farthest away from Harold they can get without actually leaving the library. He doesn’t go down the stairs anymore. He’s been self-reducing his pain medication until they find another source, and Shaw thinks maybe something else is at play too, but he won’t say a word about it.

Grace sniffles. “At what?”

“Girl talk. Emotions. Ice cream and hugs.”

There’s a tell tale hitch in her breath that says she’s still on the edge of a sob. “We were together for four years. I knew he had secrets. He told me he had secrets. I know it’s not important. The world is ending, but I can think about is that he lied to me.”

The smell of dog piss is too similar to the taste of adrenalin, and it bites at the back of her throat. _Run run run_. “Being lied to sucks,” she says instead, and pushes her fists against her thighs to keep herself in place.

“Who lied to you?”

Shaw breathes deep and lets the smell rush through her nostrils. “Everyone.”

 

Finch doesn’t move anymore, not even to eat. Reese brings him food and water, hardly leaves his side, and she can see the worry eating at him. Finch collects the intel they bring him from outside, writes it out in increasingly loose and shaky handwriting, and begins to cobble together an account of what happened.

Half the city thinks it’s the apocalypse, complete with rapture, and the other half thinks a barrel of crazy conspiracy theories that get cooked up into something new every day. The one thing every story has in common is that no one believes what the army is saying.

The military marches through the streets, occupies key corners and blocks, and keeps people from leaving the confines of the city. In the beginning, no one questioned it, but when there wasn’t a second attack, when the army didn’t leave, people started to notice that the only people doing the shooting were the good guys. It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to take over and spread fast.

“What we need,” Shaw says while looking down at the street from the window, “is to tell everyone what we know. Get everyone on the same page.”

So Grace hatches a plan, and Shaw goes with her because the streets aren’t safe, and Grace staying safe is important now. The army still sprays bullets wantonly even though they’re slowing down, and the low level gangs are starting to convalesce as the situation slowly congeals into a new normal. People get dangerous when they get starving.

They trade for spray paint with a kid who lives under a highway overpass (Sean and his buddy Tighe) and Grace tells her about color theory while she unloads a can of canary yellow on the brick wall of a school.

“Warm colors advance and cool colors recede from the eye,” she says. “That’s part of the reason sfumato is so effective. That’s the blueing of objects that are far in the distance in paintings, like mountains.”

“So it’s a trick?”

“In a way, yes. It emphasises what the artist wants you to see, to make the truth clearer.”

They write out messages over as much of the city as they can cover before nightfall. It’s crude, but they use up the dozen cans of spray paint quickly with bulletins like ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSES TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS, and DO YOU TRUST THE ARMY?, and FEAR IS NOT A REASON FOR OCCUPATION, and WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY, WE MUST UNITE. They keep on marking out street corners, sidewalks, hospitals, anything they can get to quickly while the army has its back turned. It takes them a long time to pick their way through Manhattan; the army is everywhere, and where the army isn’t, wailing packs of people are. New York was never quiet, but now it’s population is on fire.

They hand out cans of paint and clif bars to packs of kids they run across. Grace thinks they shouldn’t be on the street (they pass bodies of children and adults alike, left to bake in the summer heat) but Shaw thinks they don’t have anywhere else to go. Their parents are probably dead.

“It’s like a game. Pass on the message,” Grace tells them. “Write and draw everywhere. Don’t stop.” They scamper off to Brooklyn, to Queens, to the far reaches of the city she and Grace can’t make it to on foot before the sun sets.

Shaw begins to associate the smell of aerosol cans and paint with Grace, and it makes her smile even though it shouldn’t.

 

They steal bikes with stolen bolt cutters. Grace turns out to be a pretty good lookout. John gave her a prescription in Finch’s handwriting earlier, along with a list of useful things they should get if they can, but she knows for a fact the local pharmacies got rolled on the first week of the blackout. They’ll have to get resourceful to stock up. She doesn’t want Grace to come (she still won’t use a gun) but John won’t leave Finch, and Finch has been down for the count for the last 24 hours.

Grace comes anyhow. Shaw said, “I’m going,” and Grace said, “I’ll get my shoes.” It would have been cruel to leave her with Finch like that. Grace hasn’t fully forgiven him yet, but she will. That’s the difference between them. Grace will eventually forgive Harold for what he did, but Shaw might never.

“Should be back in two days, tops,” she tells John, but they both know that there won’t be anything he can do if they run into trouble. She packs her gun, the four remaining clips for it and restrains herself to three knives. She presses another into Grace's hands and helps her tie it to her ankle.

“I’m still bad with it,” Grace says as she makes sure it’s snug against her boot.

“Just keep the pointy end out.” It’s an old joke now.

“Be safe,” John says. Shaw nods and Grace hugs him. Harold is laid out on the sofa John dragged into the main room. He doesn’t so much as twitch at all their noise, but Grace touches his forehead gently and strokes his hand anyhow.

They head out a dawn and peddle south. Pharmacies are circled in red crayon on their map, and blue dotted lines curve around Manhattan and show where the army has blockades. They have to jump off their bikes and hide behind a pile of dead cars when a platoon marches by. The traffic jams, frozen in time when the EMPs dropped, serve as good cover. They won’t get out of the city without a fight, so they head for Brooklyn.

They trade stories as they go. People are desperate to share their experiences, desperate for someone to understand. Some people are setting up for a long occupation, some keep waiting for planes to fly overhead and drop aid packages and for normal to return, and others are planning to sneak out of the city, rush at the line and probably get killed, because it will be an escape either way.

“I’m looking for salvation,” says a man called Steve, “and I’ll bring it home.” He left his family behind in Queens and is making his way to Central Park via a route he said was told to him by god. Lots of people are headed there. Shaw doesn’t have the patience for his shit, but Grace shares an orange juice with him and he tells her about a hometown pharmacy, the kind CVS and Walgreens beat out of most places, thirteen miles off the road that looked intact and isn’t on their map.

They get there by nightfall, riding slowly to avoid blowing out a tire on the debris of broken glass and metal the litters the roads because they don’t have any spare tubes, and make camp in an abandoned parking lot with weeds poking up out of the cracks in the concrete. They lay on rolled out sleeping bags and listen to the crickets while the sun sets. They’ll strike when the moon rises, and she tells Grace to rest.

Grace stretches out her legs. Unlike Shaw she hasn’t been running, hitting, screaming, killing, for the last decade, but she doesn’t complain. She’s different than Shaw would have imagined her to be, just from knowing Finch.  She’s soft in ways that Shaw hasn’t been since she could walk, but she’s no fool.

“How’d you meet him?” The sun is almost set, disappearing behind an abandoned Cub Foods. It lights grace’s face soft, makes her red hair glow.

“He saw me painting in the park, came over and offered me ice cream. In January.” She laughs, quiet. She’s mourning him. The loss of him is written in the slump of her shoulders, the thinness of her lips. Now that she knows he’s alive, she can. Shaw isn’t exactly an expert in relationships, let alone normal grieving processes, so she keeps quiet. “He looks so different now. I mean, not really physically, but he doesn’t smile anymore. I miss his smile.”

“I met him ‘cause he was stalking me,” she says and takes a swing. The juice is thick and rich. It takes away the burn in her thighs from biking, or maybe that’s just talking with Grace. She does that to Shaw, leaves her feeling healed. “My partner had just got murdered. Finch and Reese they... helped.” It’s a gross oversimplification, and she doesn’t mention the bullets she left in Reese’s vest or the fact that it was a long time before she actually worked with them.

Grace doesn’t focus on John or Harold, though. She scoots her sleeping bag closer to Shaw’s and shifts to their shoulders touch. The burn of heat through skin on skin contact leaves Shaw breathless. “I’m so sorry about your partner. Were you close?”

And fuck, the mango juice is sticking in her throat. “Yeah. Cole was amazing. Only person to really care about me.”

And then the mango juice is sliding down her throat like honey, because Grace says, “Not anymore,” like she really means it.

 

They hit the pharmacy when it’s black, use precious battery life on a flashlight (not the LED kind - those all blew) to pick the lock on the door. Grace keeps her back to it all and stares into the dark of the parking lot.

“We’re in,” Shaw whispers, and they both slink into the building. Grace looks uncomfortable, but Shaw is in her element. She beelines for the counter and swings her legs over it. “Hit the advil and the benadryl,” she tells Grace, while she roots through the hard stuff. Codeine, oxycodone, and morphine, plus a few bags of saline solution and an IV line. Antibiotics she grabs by the handful. Bandages, gauze, and burn cream get swept up too. Grace looks sick.

“It’s okay. Whatever happens, we’ll be able to handle it with this stuff. I’ve pulled a bullet out of my own gut before. This will be a cakewalk compared to that.” She aims for lighthearted, but even in the dark she can tell she fell a few miles short.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Grace says. There’s a few hundred anti-inflammatory pills in her hands, and they rattle as her fingers tremble. Shaw doesn’t know if she means stealing or surviving the apocalypse.

The pills and supplies are loaded into packs and Shaw has her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “You can. You are.” She doesn’t say, ‘it’ll be okay,’ because Grace has been lied to enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Feedback is love. <3


	3. Chapter 3

After Shaw and Grace leave, John spends the daylight hours inventorying their supplies in the old copier room. The copy machines and scanners are long gone, replaced with rows and rows of bottled water, non perishable food items, vitamins, and batteries. Food is on the left, artillery and supplies on the right, stacked as high as the ceiling. Harold had balked at the repurposing of several library carts that once held his computer towers, but it was a tired argument made out of habit and fear, not actual discontentment. John is tempted to go back to his apartment, the one that was better suited for Rooney than it ever had been for Reese, and pull his heavy weapons from it, but the thought of leaving Finch is unbearable.

He isn’t sure what happened, or even when it started. Finch had been fine for the first few days after the EMPs hit and the grid crashed, fine even after the army’s occupation took hold and the riots started. But then day by day he grew quieter, more subdued, as his pain level increased and they rationed his medication. Then quiet became silent. Yesterday he fell asleep on the sofa, and John couldn’t wake him.

Before he stopped talking completely, back when he spent his shrinking waking hours writing out their intel longhand into old ledger books, he said, “I’m sorry John. I forgot something like this might happen.”

“What can I do, Harold?” he’d asked, because even then it was apparent things were going downhill fast. “Do you want me to find Megan Tillman?” It would be hard to find her without Harold’s computers (hard to find any doctor, really. The hospitals went into lockdown the second day after it happened) but he will find a way if Harold asks him.

“No. I’m afraid there isn’t anything to be done about it,” he says, as if that will somehow help Reese. Then he gets quieter and quieter until he just lays down and doesn’t get up again.

John checks on him every couple of minutes, lays a dry hand on his forehead (no fever) and checks his pulse (steady) and his breathing (even and unlabored). He doesn’t seem to be in distress, just sleeping. He’s relieved that Shaw and Grace are gone, because it makes sinking to his knees on the floor in front of the sofa and clasping Harold’s hand in his own less of a thought and merely something that happens.

Sending Shaw to get the prescription Harold had scrawled out seemed like the only course of action. He looks it up in a large medical dictionary after they leave, in the minutes that sit between his cycles of checking on Harold and checking their supplies. It’s an opiate, strong, and won’t do anything to help Harold other than put him into the sleep he’s already in.

Once Shaw is back and Harold won’t be alone and undefended, he’ll go out and he’ll find a doctor, Harold’s wishes be damned. Until then, he’ll stay. He won’t leave him alone in this.

 

There’s a tap on the tin can in the downstairs lobby of the library that rings up through the string like a bell. The code is wrong, spelling out, “Hello John,” instead of, “rabbit,” and he can tell from the speed of the taps that it’s neither Grace nor Shaw. He can recognise them now, just from the sound of their fingers two stories below. He’s up from the floor in front of Finch, gun in hand, before the intruder gets to the halfway point on the stairs.

Root stares up at him. She’s a mess, her arm in a sling and her hair stuck to her face in brown clumps of dried blood. “Am I too late?” she asks, and her voice is thin.

He checks, but there’s no one with her. It doesn’t surprise him; she’s always worked alone. He keeps his gun trained on her heart. “What are you doing here, Root?”

“I’m sorry I took so long. I had a... problem on my way over, but that’s taken care of now.”

John wishes Harold is here instead of laying flat on the sofa, wishes he could parse out Root’s mumblings into something that makes sense. He doesn’t trust her, never will the way Harold does. “Hands,” he says. He watches as she pulls one hand out from her leather jacket, empty, and waggles the other from the sling.

“See? All fine,” she says, exasperated, as if John’s the crazy one, not her. He marches down to her, keeps the gun high and his figure on the trigger, and pats her down. She’s clear, no sign of the small caliber gun he’s seen on her before. She pouts. “Now are you going to let me in?”

“No.”

“So I am too late after all.” She deflates, sags against the banister. She’s pale under the dried blood and stinks of days on the road and rot. “I’m sorry, John. I know how much he meant to you.”

Instinct, years of training, take over, and he has her good arm twisting in his grip, pushes her against the handrail until she’s bent over it and balanced precariously against him. He tucks the muzzle of his gun under her chin and watches her face contort. “What do you know about this?” Because she’s talking about Harold, and Harold dying is an unacceptable outcome.

Her eyes are bright. “He’s alive? I’d hoped, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Talk,” and she’s tipped over the banister so far that if he lets go she’ll drop the two stories down. It won’t kill her, but it will hurt.

“Relax, John. I don’t want to hurt Harold. I would never hurt him.” He squeezes her arm until she continues. He can already see red marks in the shapes of his fingers that will turn into bruises later. “Harold built the machine to understand people. But in order to do that he had to do more than show it what people did, he had to show it what people were made of. He gave it access to his own brain. A neural implant that links directly to the machine.”

“How do you know all this?”

She smiles. “I asked. Now do you want my help or not?”

He bites his tongue and pulls her back onto the safety of the stairs. He doesn’t take his eyes off her, even when she’s on the floor in front of Harold two minutes later. Bear is at her side. The dog is wagging his tail, unconcerned that she was the one who kidnapped him and is a possible threat.

“Don’t touch him,”  he says, and keeps a firm grip on her arm. She leans in as close to Harold as he lets her, close enough that her hair drips onto him and flakes of brown, dried blood come off onto the blanket he tucked around him earlier.

His throat is tight when he asks, “Can you help him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said it was an implant.” An implant in Harold’s brain, in his amazing mind. Adrenalin kicks in and kills the panic that is welling in his throat, replaces it with the chemical cool of clarity that the CIA trained into him. “Pacemakers stopped working. People died.” Unpleasant thoughts of Harold laying brain dead float in, and no level of CIA training can push them away.

She gives him a tight lipped smile, sympathetic and patronizing. “Oh John. It’s not that simple. It’s not really electronic, not anymore. I think I know what happened.” The grin is ferral now. “But I need something from you. A promise.”

She takes his silence as affirmation. It’s not, but it might as well be. If she can help Harold, it is worth any compromise.

“I need you to help me, when this is over. Can you promise me you’ll do that?”

“Done. Now what do you need to help him?”

“Harold made the implant to give the machine access to his brain, had it installed years ago when he was first teaching it how to see the world. But the machine fed his brain as much as he fed it. He turned it off, but it was still there, still alive, and it grew into his synaptic passageways. But when the EMPs dropped it stopped being able to access him remotely. They’ve been connected for so long, he couldn’t work without it. The machine was slowly starved out of him.”

His grip on her arm slackens, and she reaches out and touches him, gently, just a light hand on his arm. “He’s still alive. I think that if we can contact the machine, connect them again, we’ll be able to get him back. He turned off to self preserve, a hibernation cycle for when the battery reaches 5%.”

“The machine is dead. There’s nothing electronic _left_ , Root.” His hope flickers.

She turns on him, angry and hissing. “It’s not _dead_ , it’s just lost and doesn’t know how to get home.”

 

Shaw and Grace come back, laden with supplies and road weary from the long bike ride. John rises from the floor in front of Harold, but he’s too slow to catch them before Shaw gets sight of Root, still bent at the knee next to Finch’s head. Shaw goes still and Reese can see her hand float towards a knife, ready for whatever happens next.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “What’s she doing here?”

“She can help Harold,” he says, and he hopes his eyes convey just how important that is, because he knows his voice can’t. She and Grace are still at the top of the stairs. Shaw won’t let Grace in further until she’s cleared the situation, and he respects her for that. It’s what he would have done with Harold.

“Yeah? Like she helped him last time? I remember her being less than helpful when she kidnapped him and led us on a merry chase across the country.”

“Hello, Shaw,” Root says, and spins on her heels to face her. John moves to stand at the armrest of the sofa, close enough to Shaw and Grace that he can get between them and Root if need be. Root smiles wide, but doesn’t move.

Grace stands frozen, her arms full of bags of rattling pills. She’s staring at Root and she’s pale under her bright red hair. “You,” she whispers, and it’s amazing how she can suck the air right from the room with just a word. He understands why Finch was in love with her. “You met me in the park. You told me you were a _children’s book writer_.” The venom in her voice is new to John. Grace angry, Grace scared, is unacceptable, because Harold would find it unacceptable.

Root’s smile grows, wider and wider until all her teeth gleam. “I lied.” She wipes a hand across her face and dried blood flakes off. “Sorry.”

Grace drops the bags to the floor, they hit with a clatter, and bolts into the back of the library. Shaw glares at him, blames him he thinks, and keeps her hand on her knife but doesn’t draw it.

Root doesn’t get up, just swivels her eyes to bore into John’s. “I need things, John. Parts, wires, batteries.”

Electronics are fried,” he says slowly. Maybe she’s insane after all. Maybe this is all a delusion and maybe Harold is really just slipping away.

She rolls her eyes. “Everything was fried in the blast, but new things we build will work just fine, John,” and she says his name long and slow and it sounds nothing like when Harold says it.

“Make a list,” he says, “but don’t write it down. You’re coming with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is love! <3


	4. Chapter 4

 

Shaw waits until Reese and Root are gone, makes sure Finch is still breathing, before she goes to find Grace. She knows where she’ll be, but she gives Grace time to think before going after her.

She finds her in the back stacks, the over sized book collection, with her back pressed against a two foot print book of Klimpt paintings. “Hey,” she says, because she really is shit at this.

When she sees Shaw she snaps her head up, and her eyes are red and dry. She’s more angry than sad this time around, but it’s probably from the same feeling of being used. Shaw tries to remember what it was like to be in a warzone for the first time, to have enemies and allies and the blurring lines between them, and have it be a new experience. She can’t. She does remember Cole, bleeding out on the floor, eyes staring up at her.

“I can’t believe I reacted like that.” Grace’s voice is shakey.

“I shot her in shoulder, you know, before all this happened. So I wouldn’t worry too much.” Root dropping to the ground in the empty server warehouse floats easily to mind, but so does the memory of Root with a iron in a hotel room. “She almost got me too.” She doesn’t say how close it was. Grace seems to actually care about that sort of thing (cares about her).

“And how she’s helping us? Helping him?”

“I don’t know. She’s crazy.” It’s dark in the back stacks without the overhead lighting, but Shaw gets used to it quickly. Getting used to whatever is thrown at her is part of her job description. If they ever do get the power grid back (she doesn’t think they will) it’ll be strange to have the lights again, but she’d get used to that too. Grace is looking at her in the shadows. “She’s crazy, but she’s also right sometimes.”

“I don’t want him to die.” Grace has her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. “I can’t love him, not like I used to, but he’s a good man.”

Shaw doesn’t know what to say. She’s never loved anyone, not like that, and she can’t imagine the Finch that Grace used to know. She tries to picture him approaching her in the park with an ice cream cone, but it ends up being a generic man with a blank face in her imagination. So instead of spewing a line of crap she sits down next to Grace, shoulder to shoulder, until Grace’s face relaxes and her breathing evens out.

“Thank you,” she says, and Shaw doesn’t know why.

“For what?”

“For being here.”

They get up after awhile, walk back to the circulation area where Finch is still laid out on the sofa, and wait for Reese and Root to get back. Grace sits with him, not touching him this time, and Shaw sharpens her knives. There’s a shift in the air current and she smells Grace next to her as much as hears her approach. She looks down and finds Grace’s fingers threaded through her own, the weight of her warm and new.

 

Shaw listens as Root repeats the explanation about the neural implant and his connection to the machine when she and Reese get back, laden with wires and metal bits. John buys it, full stop, but Shaw is skeptical. She can’t imagine Finch being stupid enough to stick something like that in his brain and leave it there. But she also can’t imagine anyone being stupid enough to build the machine in the first place, so maybe it makes sense after all.

Root is cleaned up a little now, blood washed off and her hair pulled back, but she still looks like a wild dog, and Shaw keeps a knife within reach at all times. Root is tying wires together in a long line, bits and pieces she and Reese have salvaged from god knows where, and hooking them up to the positive and negative ends of a pile of batteries with tinfoil.

The library, which was never a clean space, is even more cluttered than before. Piles of wire and cords and a long antenna stretch over the ground. Shaw doesn’t venture into the fray, keeps her back to the wall and watches Root and Reese on the floor together, pawing through it.

“You really think this is gonna work?”

It doesn’t surprise her that Reese says, “It has to.” She trusted Cole, but even that wasn’t like what Reese has with Finch. She doesn’t understand it; it’s a obvious, glaring weak spot for both of them.

“Yes.” Root picks up a small blue light bulb from the mix, the kind meant for giant Christmas trees, and splices it onto a wire on an empty wooden orange crate. “The machine is alive out there. Harold built it bigger than anything so small as New York, bigger than just the power grid.” Shaw was on board with that, despite how crazy it sounded. From what ‘Research’ provided back when she was working with Cole, it was a pretty damned huge network.

“We’re not the only ones rebuilding, either,” Reese chimes in. “We saw the army collecting too. They’re trying to control who has access to the tech that’s left.” She wonders if that means they have working tech or if they’re just trying to stop people from trying to rebuild. “Army has radios,” Reese continues, and answers her question, “but they’re spread thin.”

Root hands a long, thick piece of metal to Reese, a wicked smile on her face. “Put that on the roof. We’re building an antenna.”

She waits until he’s up the back staircase, a trial of braided copper behind him, before she turns to Shaw and says, “we’ll need antiseptic.”

Grace goes to get it before Shaw can say, “what for?” and she’s too slow to stop Root from twisting Finch so he’s on his side, face pressed into the back of the sofa. Too slow to catch the glint of metal in her hands as she drives something long and sharp into the base of his skull.

He bleeds heavy, but doesn’t so much as twitch, even when she pulls the shiv out. She’s too slow to stop it from happening, but she has Root on the floor, boot to her throat, the second she pulls away from him. She pulls Finch’s collar away, tries to get a closer look at the wound while feeling for a pulse. It seeps blood, fast but not fast enough to be an artery, and looks deep, but the thing underneath is what catches her eye. A tube of something that looks like plastic, thin and hard to make out, covered in blood and set just below his skin near his ear.

Grace is beside her, hands shaking, and she’s pouring antiseptic onto a clean cloth. It’s Shaw that speaks, though. “Root, if he dies, I’ll kill you.” John will want the responsibility, but he’ll have to fight her for it. Not for Finch, but for Grace.

They have him cleaned up, the opening of the skin around the tube sutured open, before John comes back down, and Shaw waits for him to explode, to strangle Root and watch her twitch until she’s dead, but he doesn’t. He just ghosts a hand near the wound, careful to keep his dirty hands away from it, looks at Root, and hands her the wire that connects to the antenna and to the pile of daisy-chained batteries in the corner of the room. She sterilizes it and without any hesitation jams the wire into the hole in Finch’s skull and threads it in until it makes a click Shaw’s never heard come from inside someone’s head before.

There’s a pause and they roll him onto his back again. Shaw thinks maybe it’s a dud (or maybe Root’s just batshit after all) when Finch’s eyes snap open. Grace gasps and John presses himself in close.

“Harold?” He doesn’t sit up, but he does reach one hand towards John, and the other to the back of his neck. The blood on his fingers when he pulls it away leaves him paler than Shaw’s ever seen him.

She watches Root, though. Watches her stare at the little blue light bulb she hooked up to the wire as well, screwed into the cheap wooden orange crate. It flashes in morse code. Root doesn’t write it down, just stares with wide eyes that don’t blink, not once. Shaw reads it live too.

CAN YOU HEAR ME the light bulb blinks.

There’s no transmitter, no way to say anything back; they built a receiver only. Root is crying and petting the tiny light bulb, apologising to it. She’s as whacked out as anyone Shaw’s met, but it doesn’t change the fact that Harold’s awake now, and somehow whatever Root did worked.

John helps Finch sit up gently, and he and Grace bracket him on the sofa. The wire trails out from behind his ear, and blood drips steadily onto his shoulder. Reese has a towel balled up and behind his head to help staunch the flow. Finch stares at the wire with wide eyes.

“Oh,” he says, in the quiet way someone would say, ‘oh, it’s stopped raining, how nice,’ not, ‘oh, a woman who kidnapped me stuck a wire into my brain and hooked me up to a giant metal spike and now I feel much better.’ He doesn’t look great yet, still pale, and he hasn’t tried to move on his own. “We’re running out of battery life,” he says with a distant look in his eye. “I’ll be quick.”

Shaw’s brain catches on the ‘we.’ He could be referring to all of them, to Root who built the thing while he was still out of it, but she doesn’t think that’s the ‘we’ he’s talking about.

“Build a dish, a big array,” he says. He doesn’t look at anything except the wire and, Shaw realizes, the light bulb Root is still stroking. “Batteries will keep running out, we’ll need a continual power source. Solar is a good start.”

“Harold, what--”

Finch cuts him off. “No time, John,” and Harold does drag his eyes up to look at Reese finally. Shaw can practically taste his relief. “Tell other people to start building too. We need new paths of communication to let it back into the city. Everything will be okay,” and it’s clear he’s talking to Reese now. “Ms. Groves is right. Help her.”

The light bulb begins to dim, and so does Harold. He sags between them and John holds him upright.

“Harold? Harold!” Finch’s eyes drop shut and he’s out again. Grace is the one who lays him back down, turns him so he’s not laying on the wire still jammed up into his brain.

“Well then,” Shaw says, and she looks at Root. “Guess you’re sticking around.”


	5. Chapter 5

Grace makes Harold as comfortable as she can, keeps pressure on the hole in his head (and tries to ignore the wire coming out of it) and helps Reese hook him up to an IV to keep him hydrated. She’s never inserted a needle into a vein before, but Shaw helps her line it up, and she’s always had steady hands. Shaw is training her in on it, but she doesn’t think she’s any more a medic than she is a fighter. The bleeding from his head is slowing and almost stopped, and John doesn’t seem too concerned, but the blood soaked towel slowly staining the sofa leaves her nauseated.

There isn’t room for her on the sofa with Harold laid out on it like he is, and she’s useless with technology and unable to help Root (or Groves, or whatever her name is) and John as they sort through the pile of waste wires and metal and build whatever it is that they’re building. Her first aid experience goes as far as calling an ambulance, so she can’t do anything to help Harold either. The smell of blood doesn’t seem to bother anyone else, but it’s pungent and just about sends her over the edge.

She stands there, unable to tear her eyes from the damned wire that they arranged to drape over his shoulder and under his arm, when Shaw touches her elbow gently and raises her eyebrows at her. And thank god, because she doesn’t think she can stand to be in the room a second longer.

“Come on, let’s go,” Shaw says, and leads her to the supply room in the back. She hands her a bullet proof vest. The velcro is easy to figure out, and it sits tight across her chest in a way that’s not uncomfortable, but impossible to ignore. Shaw checks it, cinches it tighter, and thumps her once with a small smile. Shaw hadn’t given her a vest before, when they’d rode out of the city to steal all that medicine, and that should make her nervous.

“Are we going to war?” It should be a joke. Any other time it would have been, but Shaw’s serious face means its not. “Or out for dinner?” And any other time that would have meant a date.

“We’re not doing any good here. We’re going to do some recon.”

Finally, Grace thinks. She’s more than ready for some answers. She won’t be much help to Shaw in a fight, but she doesn’t bother voicing it; Shaw already knows that and wants her with her anyhow. So she adjusts the vest, slips a pullover tank top on top, and fills her pockets with mace.

Shaw leads them out of the shadow of the library and onto the street. They only have to dodge four people to get to the corner, and none of them grab at her hands this time.

The streets are still covered in filth, and there is still the ticka-ticka-ticka percussion of gunshots, but something is different this time. The city looks the same visually - like it’s been through a warzone with buildings full of bullet holes and all the first storey glass blown out of every building for miles - but the people are different. The screaming, hissing, wall punching and face scratching is mostly gone, replaced with a more quiet desperation.

And the army is shrinking.

Only two platoons pass by them, and each looks like its missing members. “What the hell is going on?” Shaw asks. She has her gun in hand, out of sight and by her leg, even though the soldiers didn’t so much as look twice at them.

They pick their way another three blocks when a kid, maybe nineteen and with too-wide eyes steps in front of them and stares at Shaw, mouth hanging open. Grace curls a hand around the mace in her pocket. He’s just a kid, but he’s got four friends lining up behind him.

“Nice ass,” he says, but he’s looking at Shaw’s breasts, covered by the flat plate of the vest. Grace should be uncomfortable, but she’s not. She’s just fed up.

Apparently so is Shaw. “Get lost, kid.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then you’re going to wind up with two broken thumbs. The hospitals are all down. Just walk away.”

His fish mouth flaps and Grace watches the words sink into his brain. He goes for Sam’s wrist, to pin her to the wall, but he’ll be too slow. She can already see Shaw drawing back, coiling muscles for a well timed strike. Grace has the can of mace out, cap flicked off, and firing before either of them can connect. She stands upwind and lets it spray until the kid is on the ground, hissing and kicking, and his friends bail without him, ducking behind an abandoned and raided food truck.

Shaw looks at her and she’s impossible to read. “You didn’t have to do that,” she says, and steps over the kid and away from the wall. The pepper spray hangs in the air and they both walk away before they call any attention to themselves. “I could have handled it.”

“I know,” Grace says. “But there are enough people hurt already.”

Sam nods. It’s not approval, just acceptance. Grace thinks she likes that better, thinks approval is overrated.

After John Reese came to her (when she was out of water, out of food, and out of hope) saying, “Harold is alive,” she and Shaw teamed up simply by default. John and Harold were glued to the hip, and as Harold got sicker, she and Shaw got closer. She expected Sam to dislike her; she wasn’t a fighter and it was clear she wasn’t ever going to be. But when Sam went out to scout or hunt for supplies she asked, “Wanna come?” and Grace found herself walking towards her. They drifted together, washed up things no one else had time for. Grace likes her. She’s sharp and dangerous and kind all at once.

Sam points out a street corner four blocks down. It stands out in bright colors, covered in a canopy of umbrellas (polka dot, striped, zebra patterned) that have been strung together with rope, and it’s filled with old women standing under it to escape the sun. They pick their way towards them, careful to avoid the piles of waste and the crashed and abandoned cars that still clog up the streets and sidewalks.

The old women, a mixed bag of ages from sixties on up to an old black woman who has to be at least ninety, coo at them and share water from a covered bucket. “Have a drink, you’re making me thirsty just looking at you.”

They’re handing out leaflets, handwritten and on the backs of children’s homework assignments. It’s sparse on information, but after a quick glance Grace can see the message even before one of the women voices it. “We’re taking back the city, sugar. Go see Lionel for details.”

Lionel, it turns out, is a cop who set up shop in the middle of Central Park. Grace looks for Steve, for any of the people migrating from Brooklyn to Central Park they’d met while on bike, but she doesn’t see him. She hopes he isn’t dead.

“Hey,” he says as they approach, “I remember you. You’re one of Wonderboy’s crew.” His accent is thick and gruff and fitting. He watches Shaw like she’s something dangerous. “They alright? Kinda expected to hear from them by now.”

“We’re dealing,” Shaw says. She doesn’t say any more, and Grace files that away. “What’s going on? We need information.”

The cop tips his head at Grace with a question written in his eyebrows. Grace sticks out her hand. “I’m Grace Hendricks,” she says, and the cop shakes with her, firm and calloused.

“Fusco,” he offers back. “I’d say good to meet you, but not much is good right now.”

Just like the city as a whole, Central Park is different now. It’s less visibly damaged than the streets of Manhattan, but the toll is in the people. It’s filled, to the brim, with refugees.

Fusco continues. “Carter, that’s my partner, she’s got connections everywhere. She knows Elias. He owes her one.” Grace doesn’t know who that is, but Shaw does. Her face twitches just a little bit. No one else would probably even notice it, but Grace has spent time looking at Sam, has practiced drawing her in her mind. “Elias practically runs the city anyway, so she and him, they figure they should make sure the city stays in one piece. Government is gone, the army is, well, they’re not doing anything good either, what’s left of them anyway.”

Grace looks around for any evidence of the army, but they are almost gone here too. A few camouflaged soldiers walk the perimeter, but so few it’s almost a joke.

“That’s what’s going on. We’re... organizing. Recruiting. Trying to get control of our infrastructure before before we make a move. Here,” he says, and pulls one of the fliers out of his pocket, “pass it around if you haven’t seen it yet.”

 

Armed with new information, they go back to the library. Grace is relieved that John’s opened the windows and the stuffy, bitter smell of blood and grime is dissipated. By the time she and Shaw get back it’s been a few hours, but it scares her how fast Root is able to pull something together from the piles of wire and metal on the floor into something that looks like a satellite dish for a TV.

Harold is still asleep, unconscious, on the sofa. He looks old with the blanket tucked around him. His arm is arranged on top of him with the IV needle stuck through it. He’s incongruous with the piles of machine parts around him. The dog, Bear, is laying on top of him. It growls at her when she gets too close.

Shaw has her gun out and pointed at Root. “Where’s Reese?” she asks, before Grace even realizes he’s not in the room.

Root doesn’t even look at her. “On the roof. Installing the solar panels.”

“I’ll find him,” Grace offers. It’s half selfish (she doesn’t want to be in the same room as Root) but she knows without asking that Shaw doesn’t want Root out of her sights either, not until she’s sure Reese isn’t dead somewhere. It’s a good trade. Shaw nods at her, shares a little smile, and Grace walks to the back staircase.

Reese is screwing something large and black against the roof at an angle by hand. It’s close to sunset now, but it’s summer, so the light lasts long into the evening. If she was still a painter and not a survivalist, it would be a lovely time for a color study. Instead she picks up a screw and hands it to John.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

“You’re welcome.”

John leaves her to screw in the remaining bolts and moves to unwind a long cord of hand-braided wire. She sets the screws down as soon as he passes them to her and unfolds the filer she’d put in her pocket.

“We talked to a man who knows you. He said his name was Fusco.”

John drops the line of wire and plucks the sheet from her hands. He reads it silently before looking back to her with a smile on his face.

“They’re rebelling. I underestimated Fuco.”

Grace shakes her head. “He said it was two other people too: Carter and Elias. I’m not sure who they are...” she trails off and watches John’s face pinch and fold until it’s back to what it was before Harold woke up.

“Carter is a good woman.” That Elias isn’t goes unsaid.

“Whoever they are,” she continues, “maybe it doesn’t matter who they _were_. The city needs people on its side.”


	6. Chapter 6

 

Harold wakes quickly, without the usual grogginess. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. There’s a hand on his and he twists to grab at it and feels the pull of an IV line. He cracks open his eyes, blinks through the dryness, and looks up at John.

“Hello, Mr. Reese.” His voice is hoarse. “How long have I been asleep?”

“This time? A day. It took time for the solar panels to build up a charge.”

John’s arms slip around him and the world tips as he’s shifted until he’s upright again. He’s dizzy, but forces it down and concentrates on the warmth of John’s hand, still pressed against his back. He’s also, he realizes, ravenous.

John’s voice comes to him close to his ear, “How are you feeling?” and he feels a sharp sting at the base of his skull. He reaches back, stiffly, to find the source of the ache,  but John catches his hand. “Don’t.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any food left? Or are we starving now?” He genuinely doesn’t know. He remembers John stockpiling food by the armfuls in the beginning, but the days after that are hazy. He’s not sure how long its been or what’s left.

John dashes away to fetch something, and Harold focusses on petting Bear who has settled with his head on his knee. The dog, at least, seems content. Bear will probably outlive them all. As he scratches the dog’s head he sees the wire that trails down over his shoulder and spills onto the floor. His eyes trace it back to its source, a pile of car batteries that are in turn hooked up to a spider web of copper wires that snake up through the window. The ache in his skull pulses deeper. He catches the wire in his hand and, light headed, follows it up until it disappears under his skin. He’d always felt connected to the machine, but he’d been unaware how connected the machine was to him.

He should have connected his weakness to the implant earlier, been able to forestall it somehow. But he genuinely forgotten about it. It had been years ago, and he’d deactivated it. It shouldn’t have been able to do this.

John is back and pressing a bowl of dry oats, raisins, and peanuts into his lap. It’s not overly appetizing, but the bottle of water he hands him next looks like ambrosia. They’re alone. “Where is everyone?”

“Root is sleeping. Bear is keeping an eye on her. Shaw and Grace are in the library still,” and he waves his hand towards the back half of the library. Harold thinks it feels uncomfortably like the calm before the storm.

There’s a strange, nagging feeling in the back of his mind, an empty spot waiting to be found. He can’t put his finger on what it is, only that it isn’t there. He looks to his left, sees a wooden box on the ground with a wire wrapped around screws that trail back to the pile of batteries. Sees a blue light bulb screwed on the top. It turns on, blinks, and Harold feels a rush of endorphins flood his brain. He closes his eyes.

John’s hand is on his shoulder, and he realizes he’s lost time. “Harold?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Reese, merely... reacclimating.” The dizziness is slowly receding. The mix of dried food is tasteless and chalky in his mouth, but it settles him. He shoots a sidelong look at John and finds him watching his every move. “I suppose Ms. Groves has told you what she knows by now.”

“She told me that you’re connected to the machine. That without it... accessing you,” and John’s voice catches on the word, “you shut down.” He watches John. It’s fascinating to see his care written so clearly on his face. “Does that mean it’s accessing you now?”

“Yes.” The answer comes unbidden from his mouth.

John’s watching him. He can see the questions forming on his lips, but he doesn’t ask. He answers them anyhow. “I built the machine a window into my mind, but I closed it. It was just a piece of leftover hardware that wasn’t worth the risk to extract. Dormant. Or, that’s what I thought.” He takes a swig of the water. It’s crips, but room temperature. Cold drinks are a thing of the past, at least until winter comes. “The connection was benign, but the loss of it was... problematic.” John’s eyebrows raise at the understatement. “It couldn’t connect, so itevolved to solve the problem.”

Harold swallows another sip of water and lets his eyes drift back to the blinking blue light. It’s mesmerizing, delicate. “The machine was unable to communicate, Mr. Reese, but it found a way.”

John’s eyes track over to the bulb.

“Oh, certainly with the morse code as well. But I mean through me, John.” Endorphins wash through his mind in response. _Yes_.

 

He drifts in and out of sleep for the rest of the day, his body still fighting the shock of first the loss of the machine, and then the sudden arrival of it. He rouses himself long enough to reassure whomever is near him that he isn’t slipping back into a coma. John comes to him the most often. Ms. Shaw seems content that everyone else is worrying for him and expends no extra energy on the subject herself. Ms. Groves and Grace stay on the fringes, though he thinks for different reasons.

He spends the time his eyelids are closed watching flashing lights behind his eyes and listening to the hum of the machine that only he can hear. The flashes are probably morse code, but he doesn’t have the energy yet to translate them. The hum is beautiful, melodic, pulsing through the implant in the base of his skull. The wire that threads out of him is hot like an exposed nerve, but the hum cools it. The machine doesn’t speak to him, not in words or even in images. It wasn’t designed for direct contact like this, and that it can even achieve this level of communication astounds him.

He waits until they are all asleep, John in the room with him, laid out on the floor near Bear with a spartan looking blanket (unwilling to let him out of his sight, even now) before he begins to experiment.

“Can you hear me?” he asks. He knows the machine can’t physically hear him, there are no working speakers left in the library, and even if they build new ones, they’ll have to find ways to broadcast. But he thinks that won’t stop the machine from understanding him, from hearing him in a different sort of way. What he thought was a window into his brain is, he thinks, a door. One that he hopes opens both ways.

As soon as he asks the question, quietly because he knows John sleeps lightly, warmth floods him from his scalp to his toes. No actual thought, no ideas or knowledge comes with it, just complete comfort that settles his nerves. It leaves him feeling more relaxed than he’s felt in years. The machine tapped into an emotional part of his brain and is using it to communicate. But feelings, while useful, are not the machine’s purpose, and not what it was built for.

“Can you communicate specific ideas? New ideas?”

What happens next is a blur. He’s expecting memories, or at best a flash of something he’s never seen before with his own eyes. What he gets is a power surge, and he wakes up with John’s hands on his face and his back screaming in pain from where he landed on the floor.

“What happened?” John asked, quick and to the point. His voice is steady and controlled, but he can feel his hands shake against him as he checks him for new injuries. It feels like the train station all over again, Root’s presence an empty hole now as it was then. It takes him a moment to find his voice again. Strange internal vibrations leave him shaking and his tongue feels heavy. He looks over and sees the blue light bulb flashing incessantly, unendingly. The machine is panicking, quiet in his mind for fear of hurting him again.

“It’s alright. I’m alright.” He isn’t sure if he’s speaking to the machine or to John, but both seem to calm slightly. His ears ring and his voice sounds strange and alien.

John moves to help him back up, but he puts a hand on his arm to stop him. “Before we do that, I’d like to test one more theory,” he says. He loops a shaking finger around the wire at the base of his skull and starts to pull. It catches, painfully, and he pulls harder. He hears John say, “Finch, wait--”

He wakes up back on the sofa. His vision is filled with John and nothing else. He must have moved him while he was unconscious.

“Well we know the answer to that now.” John is masking his fear with short remarks. It’s a habit the man utilizes often, and Harold can spot it a mile away now. He can feel the wire again. The back of his head is sore and throbbing, but the connection is reassuring. He’s not sure whose thought that is, his own, or the machine’s.

“I was hoping physical contact would not be necessary,” he says, because it’s clear John needs to hear his voice. The prospect of being tethered to the library is unappealing.

John doesn’t let go of his arm. He’s hard to see in the dark; Harold misses incandescent light bulbs more than he thought possible. “We’ll find a way to fix this,” John says.

Harold squeezes his arm back. He doesn’t say he thinks they’re beyond that, that fixing things was something neither of them were any good at.


	7. Chapter 7

John waits until morning, until Harold promises not to risk his mind further by conducting risky experiments on himself, before he tucks a gun into his belt and walks out the door. The memory of waking up to find Finch on the floor, eyes rolling and mouth open, spasming, will haunt him. So will watching Finch pull the wire from his skull, the end coming out bloody, and him wilting back to the floor. He doesn’t know what the machine has done to form a connection with Finch, and he suspects Harold doesn’t really know either. As much as it worries him, they have other problems that need addressing if they intended to survive the coming days.

He unfolds the flier Grace took from Fusco and memorizes the map scrawled on it. Whomever hand copied it was not blessed with good handwriting, but the message is conveyed. Anybody who wants to help, wants information, wants to be free, should go to Central Park.

Root watches him as he double checks his gun. “Leaving so soon?” She smiles.

He hates leaving Finch like this, leaving Finch with Root. He’s conscious now, at least, and not so completely helpless, but leaving with Root still in the library feels like walking away from an unexploded bomb. “If you so much as touch him, I’ll kill you.” He whistles and Bear comes to him, tail wagging. He orders the dog to guard Finch.

“I won’t hurt him. Now go be a good dancing monkey, John.” She’s building something and doesn’t even look him in the eye.

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” he says to Shaw.

 

He finds Carter standing under an oak tree in Central Park, directing people towards shelter and the communal water tank that’s been erected. He only had to dodge one army patrol to get in, and they were moving slow, meandering and disorganized. She’s dressed all in black and looks more like the soldier she was than the police officer she is. It’s a good look on her. She looks healthy, fit. The time and the chaos has been good to her.

“John, thank god. I looked for you. I thought maybe...” She shakes her head. He should be insulted by the number of people who think he’s died. He’s harder to kill than that, and they should know better.

“Carter.”

She looks him up and down. “You doing alright? I can get you supplies, if you need them. We don’t have a lot of extras, but disbursing aid packages is kinda our game.” It’s a strange sense of dejavu, her asking him he needs help. He feels the rough stubble on his chin and wonders if he looks like the homeless man she first met. He’s not, though. He’s comfortable with his name now.

He tips his head. It feels good to stand in the shade with her. It’s almost like old times. “No, we’ll be alright.” The jerk of her chin shows she’s happy to hear it’s still a ‘we.’ He wants to let it go, but he can’t. “Where’s Elias?”

Her face closes off. “South of here. He’s working with some scientists. We need him, John.”

“You’re the one who said there’s always another way, Joss.” He doesn’t trust Elias, and neither should Carter, not after he used her son to get to her. Elias in control leaves too much unaccounted for, too many wild cards out in the open that he can’t see.

“The police force is a mess. The half that was on the HR payroll bailed after the first day anyhow. We needed boots on the ground, John, people who care about this city, and like it or not, that’s Elias and his people do. We have a lot bigger problems to worry about right now than the past.”

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what would come out of his mouth if he did.

“Government’s gone,” Carter continues. “Nobody’s seen bodies, they just up and disappeared before it happened. So we’re stepping in.” She levels a look at him. It’s bright out in the midday sun, but the shade of the oak tree is pleasant. No one bothers them, despite how crowded the park is becoming. They give Reese a berth because he looks dangerous, but they stay clear of Carter out of something that looks like respect. “I want you on my side in this, John.”

“I don’t trust Elias.”

“Do you trust me?”

He hesitates and she sighs and looks over at a group of monks praying in a circle. “John. Things have changed. We can’t wait to be rescued anymore.”

He takes a deep breath, lets the stink of the park fill his lungs. He can smell rotting bodies, still, but mostly it’s the smell of people, hungry and unwashed. “I trust you.”

She walks out of the shadow of the oak tree and motions him to follow. “Then you’re going to have to trust me on this too. It’s a different game now.” The fact that they’re meeting in the open, that no one cares if he’s the man in the suit because the man in the suit is unimportant, is proof enough. “We’re staging a coup, and we’re not even sure who against.”

They walk past hastily made shacks that house entire families, card tables set up and lined with insulin injectors, and a line of people hand carrying water in buckets to the tank in the middle of the park. They make their way to a small sectioned off area with only a few people milling around. John recognises them as cops, although they too have shed the uniform.

“We need intel, John. Bad. We still don’t know how far this goes, who did it, or even why.”

There’s a pile of radios stacked on the grass. He whips his head to look at her.

“We’ve been collecting them. Lots of soldiers are dying, no one can figure out why, but lots more are just abandoning their posts. We’ve been getting a few here, actually.” She shakes her head. “They’re still holding the perimeter, though. Still can’t get out of the city without it turning into a war, and we’re not quite ready for that.”

He thinks about Harold and wires and dried raisins. “Getting anything through the radios?”

“Nothing. Some people say they are, say they hear morse code, but I haven’t heard boo. Can’t even find the frequency the army was using.”

“Build radio receivers, Joss. Lots of them. Build as many as you can and put them up everywhere.”

“You mean towers. Radio towers.”

He’s slipped. “Yes.”

She’s nodding. No doubt they’ve already started some similar rebuilding projects, although he’s sure they’re meant to communicate between communities and not with the vestiges of the machine. But it won’t matter; they’ll serve both purposes. “We’ve found a few engineers, a few scientists, and we’re trying to get a small power grid going. Something about algae and solar pumps. People have been congregating on university campuses. We’re concentrating on clean water first, though.” Her face darkens. “The army is hoarding the tech, even the broken stuff. We’re doing raids to get as much of it back as we can now that they’re shrinking, but it’s slowing us down. While everyone was raiding the supermarkets, they were raiding the Radio Shacks.”

“Build the antennas, Joss.”

She must see something in his face, because she doesn’t argue, doesn’t even ask what he knows. “Alright, John. Alright.” A group of kids run past. They’re collecting garbage, keeping the park as sanitary as they can. “But I need you to do something for me. Find Elias. Help him.”

“What are you going to do?” He asks her. He doesn’t say he’ll go to Elias.

“I’m going to get us some intel.”

 

John goes back to Harold first. The library isn’t far off route, and he needs to see him again. It’s an intangible need. It’s instinctual to thread through the streets to find the library, even though the city is ravaged now.

He stops at the body of a dead soldier on his way, a General from the uniform. There aren’t any obvious wounds on him, just the pooled and congealed blood that dripped from his ears and nose. It drowned him, if he didn’t die of something else first. He pulls the radio from the soldier’s hands, has to twist hard and jerk it free from the rigormortis stiffened fingers. He flips it on. There’s the click-hiss of static on the other end. It works. He listens, tries a dozen different channels, but no one speaks through it.

He pockets the radio and heads up into the library. Harold is watching him from the sofa when he comes into the room, eyes tracking him from right to left until he’s in front of him.

“I didn’t disconnect myself again, in case you were wondering,” he says dryly.

He looks better, considerably so, with color in his cheeks that hadn’t been there before. The wire that trails to the pile of batteries is intact, and someone, probably Grace, has left him a stack of books to sift through while there’s still light to read. Bear is still at his side.

“I found Cater,” he says, instead of what he wants to say, which is ‘good, please don’t ever do that again.’ “She’s working with Elias.”

Harold watches him, and he watches Harold. “Is that so?” And he sees as much as hears the not-lie in the stillness of Harold’s face.

“Harold--”

“I didn’t initiate the contact, Mr. Reese. But if you recall from our previous dealings with the machine, I never did then, either.” John sinks down on the sofa next to him and feels the spine of an Arthur C. Clarke book press against his leg. John had left a pile of books for him to pass the time with, but they sit unopened. 

“It turns out the machine is very adept at learning new skills.”

“It’s communicating with you?” He doesn’t say it. It’s too alien, but Finch fills it in for him.

“In my mind. Yes. We got past our previous... communication barrier.”

Reese swivels his head. Other than Bear and Harold, the library is quiet. Empty. Finch sees him tense. “Root left.”

John starts. Finch has never called her Root before. “Alone?” She’s a wild card, as much as Elias is.

“Yes. She snuck out. I believe the machine,” his voice goes hollow, “had something for her to do. Ms. Shaw and Grace left soon after.” He gives a soft snort, amused, and it’s eerie to hear. Reese isn’t happy they left Finch here alone, unguarded except for Bear.

“Elias is 2.4 miles south-southwest of here. 405 Lexington Avenue. The Chrysler building.” Harold looks up at him, eyes eerie and unblinking. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn't it?”

He wonders how it came to this. He knows he should leave, find Elias before dark, but he’s pinned to the sofa, to Harold next to him. His voice catches in his throat. “Are you alright?”

When Harold swallows his adam’s apple bobs above his tie. John had loosened it when Harold first fell ill, and he’s only straightened it, not tightened it, since waking up. It adds to the strangeness of him now. He’s never seen Harold disheveled like this. Even after Root kidnapped him he’d managed to stay moderately put together. “No, Mr. Reese. But there’s not much we can do about it right now.”

There’s something warm on his hand, and he realizes it’s Harold’s own, with the IV line still sticking out of his skin. He doesn’t grasp it, just let’s Harold’s fingers dance lightly over the backs of his and tries to commit the feeling to memory.

Harold doesn’t look him in the eye, and John finds himself homesick for how things used to be in a way he’d forgotten possible. “Go find Elias. The city needs saving, John.”


	8. Chapter 8

 

“You don’t have to come,” Shaw says as she suits up. She’s looking up at Grace while she laces her boots. Root has been gone for a half hour now. Harold (sitting on the couch, back straight and eyes not tracking anything) just told them, “She had somewhere to go,” in a voice that is not the voice of the man she remembers. Grace still doesn’t know how Root slipped out of the library without any of them noticing. She was there one second, gone the next. Harold hadn’t helped; he may have even covered for her.  

“I’m not staying here,” she says. Not with him, not now that he is wired to the antenna on the roof and something different.

They pick their way through the streets again. It’s too familiar now. Paths are being formed like goat trails through the garbage and detritus. People leave them alone for the most part, but New York isn’t empty. The streets are full of people, scavenging, rebuilding, looking for family members still. It makes trying to spot Root next to impossible.

“We’ll never find her like this.” Shaw has one hand up to her forehead to block out the sun. It’s bright out. Grace doesn’t have a watch, hers had been digital, but it has to be near noon.

“Maybe we should just let her go.” If Grace never sees the woman again, she’ll be happy.

But Sam is shaking her head. “She’s a loose end. She knows where we live.”

It sends a shiver up Grace’s arms. They have no way of knowing where Root went, why she even left. She could come back at any time. Grace could wake up on her sleeping bag in the back of the library, two feet from Shaw’s, and Root could be there standing over them, trailing wires. She’s poison. She hurt Sam, back before Grace had a clue of what was going on, and she turned Harold into something else.

So they keep looking. They pass people as they walk, east this time, and Grace notices it before Shaw does. “They have radios. Everyone has radios.” It’s an exaggeration, but one out of every ten people they pass has a black military radio, a homemade radio, a silver radio powered storm radio. And they’re all beeping out morse code.

“Hey, where’d you get that?” Shaw says to a middle aged man wearing a baseball cap that’s seen better days. It’s a Met’s cap. They’ll probably never play again.

He looks at her over a scraggly gray beard that looks about as old as the loss of the power grid, and Grace sees a tattoo on his arm that looks military. “A woman is handing them out. Someone’s got a tower up somewhere I guess. We’re getting stuff, morse code. It’s telling us to go to Central Park, to join Carter and Elias.”

“Where is she?” Shaw doesn’t get near him, doesn’t even step an inch closer, but something about her shifts, expands, and the guy sees it too. She growls and Grace’s heart rate goes up. Because it’s Root, it has to be Root.

“Who? The radio chick? I don’t know, lady. She headed that way.” He points west. Shaw doesn’t follow his finger, doesn’t take her eyes off him. Grace doesn’t take her eyes off Shaw. “But if you want to find someone in this hell hole, try Carter.”

“Carter?”

The beard jerks as he works his jaw side to side, and sure enough his teeth are yellowed, but she doesn’t spot the telltale bulge of chewing tobacco against his cheek. Maybe he quit, or maybe he ran out. “Yeah. She’s got my vote when this is over.”

 

They find Carter just three blocks outside of Central Park. They shouldn’t find her, it’s half dumb luck that they do, but it seems like everyone they talk to knows who Carter is, and they narrow down her most recent location faster than they should be able to without GPS. She’s crouched next to a burned out grocery store’s front window, her feet planted on the aluminum sign that used to hang above it. She double takes when she sees them.

“You looking for John? You just missed him.”

Grace hasn’t even spared John a second thought in all of this. It never occurred to her that they could wait, try and find him.

Shaw speaks up before she does. “We’re not.” She likes the way Sam speaks; everything is final, carefully cut together, no room for negotiation.

“Good to see you again, Shaw,” and there’s something in her voice that carries a long story with it, but she doesn’t elaborate. “You must be Grace,” the woman says. “Fusco told me about you. I’m Carter.” She waves a hand a them and the fall into the shadow of the grocery store with her and press their backs against the cinder blocks.

This is the woman who is trying to pull them out of the ashes. She’s tall, powerfully built, and dressed in dark clothes that make her look like a cat burglar, or maybe Che Guevara.

“Hello.” She nods at Carter, who looks her over from head to foot. She knows she must look strange. She doesn’t have the musculature of a fighter and she doesn’t even have a weapon, except for the can of pepper spray that is tucked in her pocket. She’s wearing a pair of shin length peach khakis, for gods sake. She draws herself up to her full height and looks Carter in the eye. “I hear you run New York now.”

Shaw snorts and Carter’s eyes widen. “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m just trying to make sure there’s a New York left at the end of this.”

And that, Grace thinks, is a pretty good answer.

“We’re looking for Root,” Shaw says. “A little bird told me you know where people are at.”

Carter screws up her face. Clearly she hasn’t had good experiences with her either. “Root? What does she have to do with any of this.” Shaw drops a look that says something between, ‘you don’t want to know,’ and, ‘if I told you I’d have to kill you,’ and Carter just takes a deep breath. “Should have known there was more going on here than I knew. John was sure cryptic enough. As for finding her, I wish we knew as much as people want us to. We have a network that’s growing. We’ve certainly got more ears to the ground than we did before, but we don’t have tabs on everyone in the city.” She snorts. “No one has that sort of power.”

Neither she nor Shaw blink.

“Sure. Yeah, that’d be crazy,” Shaw says, and leaves it at that.

“Look, I’d love to help you, but I’m actually in the middle of something here.”

As soon as she says it, Grace sees movement from the corner of her eye. A soldier rounds the corner a block and a half away from them. He’s staying clear of Central Park, skirting around the businesses that line it instead of heading in. He’s alone, dressed in camouflage that does more to make him stand out than blend in.

“I’ve been tailing him for awhile now. He’s been going in circles, but his route doesn’t make any sense and he isn’t with his platoon.” Carter says. “Tell you what, you let me handle this guy, get some answers out of him, I’ll ask around about Root.”

Shaw squints at the soldier in the distance. “Fine. But we’re not letting you have all the fun.” Sam has a hand on Grace’s shoulder, pushes her lightly against the wall of the grocery store and says without words, ‘stay here,’ because words aren’t necessary anymore.

Shaw pushes off from the wall faster than Carter, rounds the corner and saunters up to him, all hips and swinging hair. “Hey, soldier boy,” Shaw says. She walks to him, and he doesn’t stand a chance. He’s on the ground in two hits. His gun skitters across the street until it collides with the tire of an overturned VW Beetle. Grace watches it clatter to a halt. It doesn’t have a clip in it. Carter is there in a blink and she and Shaw loom over him. He looks up at her, at both of them, with wide eyes. He’s just a kid, can’t be older than twenty.

Grace peels herself out of the shadows and goes to them. She drops into a crouch next to Shaw is sitting on the kid’s chest. Sam has a knife in her hand and is holding it to his throat. Not hard, though. It doesn’t draw blood and she’s not even sure it’s actually touching his skin.

Carter keeps throwing Sam wided eyed looks with raised eyebrows, but Grace just gets comfortable next to Shaw. Carter keeps standing, keeps looking to make sure no extra soldiers are on their way, but there’s no one. Shaw growls and the kid squirms. Grace is used to this now, is comfortable with the one-two punch she and Sam have become.

“I don’t want to hurt you, kid,” Shaw says, and Grace can tell it’s for her sake. The smile that creeps up on her face in response is a surprise.

Carter, looming over all of them still says, “Take it easy, soldier. I just want to know who is giving the orders.” She’s used to being in charge, Grace can hear it in her voice.

The kid’s eyes are dark. Grace can’t tell if they’re blue or brown, the pupils are so wide from fear. The harsh sunlight doesn’t help. They’re in the open. “I don’t know, I swear to god, lady.”

Shaw rolls her shoulder and Grace can see the power building just behind the wall of her self control. The kid can see it too. “One more chance.”

“Oh god, please don’t kill me. I’m sorry, okay!”

Carter steps in, puts a hand on Shaw’s shoulder to stop her, and Grace wants to say it’s not necessary, but she’s all too aware that would ruin the carefully constructed illusion.

Grace shifts on the ground and gravel bites into her knees. She’s overly aware that if she tears the khakis they’ll be difficult to replace. She puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder before she speaks. “We’re all on the same side here. We’re all just trying to survive. Please just help us.” She says it as gently as possible. She waits for the words to sink in, for the kid to breath deep (or as deeply as he can with Shaw on his chest like that). “What’s your name?”

“Jim.”

“Well, Jim, why don’t you take us to your commander, okay?”

He looks ill, and she’s worried for a second that her only good outfit will wind up covered in sick. But he takes a couple of shallow breaths and looks a little less green. “He’s dead.”

Carter frowns and takes over the interrogation. “Okay. Then take us to whoever is giving you orders.”

“He’s dead too.”

Grace closes her eyes and counts to five. “This isn’t hard, Jim. Just take us to who tells you what to do.”

“You don’t get it. No one does. Not any more.” His voice is breaking but he swallows and keeps talking. “We fucked up. We fucked up really bad. We dropped the EMPs, okay. It was the god damned army.” His voice is shaking, and so is Grace.

All three of them still.

“Say that again,” Shaw says, and her voice is deeper and harsher than Grace has heard it yet.

“I only heard about it after, but it was us. They were freaking out about something, some machine somewhere. So they dropped the EMPs, just, _boom_. Lights out.”

  


They let Jim up after he tells them that the commanders had been dying ever since the EMPs dropped and at an exponential rate. As soon as they’d gotten their paths of communication back online, everyone who’d had anything to do with the original bombs wound up dead. No one figured it out at first, it wasn’t widespread, but it kept happening. They kept dying, one by one, until only foot soldiers were left, and most of them deserted.

“We did this? Our own god damned military did this?” Carter is pale. She’s not thinking about the dead commanders, still the EMPs.

Jim has darted off somewhere, they let him go, and Shaw sticks out a hand to help Grace to her feet. She takes it and doesn’t let go, even when she’s comfortably standing.

“To destroy the machine,” Shaw says. She doesn’t sound as surprised as Carter. From what Grace knows about her, she’s used to the government pulling the rug out from under her. Used to being lied to.

“What machine? What could possibly be worth doing _this_ to 8 million people? God knows how many people have died!”

She’s walking now, headed south again and Shaw shoves off with long legs to keep up with her. Still clinging to Sam’s hand, Grace joggs to keep pace. “Where are you going?” Shaw asks. Her voice is still deep and raw and full of a wild power. “We need to find Root.”

“I’m going to Elias. This changes our approach. We’d been operating under the assumption that there was an external threat.” She kicks a broken can that once held 55 ounces of refried beans. It clatters, hard, until it cracks against a wall. “Bastards.” She takes a deep breath. “I'll still help you find her, after. You should come with me. We have bigger problems than Root right now.”

Grace sees her own message, written in yellow spray paint, on the side of the grocery store. “We are our own worst enemy,” she says. The words are hollow and she hates canary yellow. “Let’s go,” she says to Carter.


	9. Chapter 9

 

The library is quiet, save for the muffled huffs of Bear panting against his leg. It shouldn’t bother him, the silence of being alone. He’s spent most of his adult life alone in one way or another. But with John gone to Elias, Ms. Shaw and Grace out wading through the chaos that is their city now, the library feels empty. He can’t follow their GPS signals on his computer, can’t hear John breathe through the phones. It’s lonely.

Bear whines against his knee. “Just like old times, Bear.” But the wire in his skull pulses, hot, and it’s not like old times at all.

He hadn’t lied to John. He hadn’t actively tried to contact the machine. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t wanted to repeat the overloading experience that had left him on the floor the first time. But the machine had learned something from the experience, and when John left, it tried again. Gently this time, but with the insistence he’d learned to expect from the machine.

It still relied, unexpectedly, on emotions to convey ideas. Harold had never anticipated that should the machine communicate like this (and even when he’d handed the surgeon the implant and a half million dollars, he had never imagined this) it would be so intuitive.

He feels a calmness well up in him, a sign the machine is preparing to unload a new set of data into him. The calmness starts in his legs, relaxes his sore hip and leaves him leaned back onto the sofa, boneless. Then he knows where Root is, where Grace and Ms. Shaw are and that Detective Carter is with them. Knows which street John is turning onto, how many soldiers are left patrolling, and how many men Elias has at his disposal.

It isn’t like being told a story, or reading their locations off a computer screen. One moment he’s petting Bear, and the next the knowledge is in him as if was always there, new memories of events he’s never witnessed. The bursts of data come in faster and faster as the machine grows and the number of people using radios increases. Sometimes the pauses between the welling calms (and the rush of knowledge that comes after) is hours, sometimes only minutes. But the intervals are getting closer and closer together.

The calm comes over him again, leaves him breathing deep and seeing stars. He thinks, abstractly, it’s the machine’s way of controlling the overloading, preventing his brain from going into shock. But he wishes it didn’t leave him so helpless.

This time he knows how many people the machine has killed. He wants to throw up, but the endorphins flooding his brain quell any sickness he might feel. He can only feel calm as he knows all of their names, all of their social security numbers, and to what level they were personally responsible for the destruction of New York.

Another wave of calm hits and he knows that Ms. Shaw and Grace, along with Detective Carter, are headed for Elias, same as John. They don’t know what the machine has done. He needs to tell them, he needs to tell _John_.

He tries to get up, but the wire is short and he can only stagger a few feet before it tugs at him, hot and painful. It wouldn’t matter anyhow. His legs are too weak after days of immobility to carry him very far. He falls back onto the sofa. Bear is nudging at his leg and he wonders if the dog can sense his trouble, or if the calm the machine forces on him is a smell of its own.

He needs to leave, to find John, and in another fit of calmness he knows that Root is on her way, that the machine sent out an S.O.S. on his behalf.

He physically can’t get angry, and that leaves him empty. “That isn’t what I meant,” he says, but he’s lost in data until he looks up and Root is in the room with him. He doesn’t know how long its been. She smiles. She looks like she did at the trainstation, with a new world on her horizon and only one thing stopping her from getting there.

“Hello, Harold,” she says, and she looks enviously at him. She doesn’t look him in the eye, just watches the wire the drips out of him like it’s alive, like it’s worth more of her attention that he is.

He licks his dry lips. “I need to be mobile. Will you help me?”

He knows the answer will be yes, but not because he asked, because the machine did.

She’s babbling about radio waves and portable receivers. Harold should be concerned that whatever portable machine she builds will be too weak to import the quantity of data that the machine is downloading into him, but he’s too busy knowing the locations of police officers, firemen, and first responders, spread thin over the city like butter, to think about anything else.

He tells her what he learns, because at least then someone will know. It feels morbid, a last will almost, and he wishes it were John or Grace or even Ms. Shaw who was with him, but it isn’t, and he’s losing himself.

There’s a tug on the wire and he flinches, but he’s only gone for a second. When he lifts his head from the sofa Root has pulled the wire from the other end, has it hooked up to a new array of batteries, these ones affixed to a gun belt. She slings it over his shoulder and buckles it in place. It’s heavy on him, reminds him of the bomb vest that had been strapped to John so recently.

“The receiver?”

She taps something on his chest he hadn’t even seen. His eyes don’t quite focus right. He checks, but he’s still wearing his glasses. Wires spill out of a gray metal box and intertwine with the line to his skull. “Did you doubt me, Harold?”

“No.” He says, even though his mouth started to say yes. He doubted her, but the machine didn’t, and the machine’s answer is what comes out. He can feel it in his mind, undeterred by the loss of the direct connection to the antenna.

“We need to go,” he says between rushes of calm and information. “Help me.” He doesn’t have time for niceties. He’s losing himself with every breath.

 

Root leads him down the stairs, slips an arm around his waist when it turns out his legs are weaker than he’d anticipated. She doesn’t ask where to go, but she pilots them in the right direction. “Chrysler building,” he puffs out, and Root just nods. A radio hangs on her belt and he can hear morse code leak out in a steady stream of beeps and pauses, never ending. He doesn’t have the energy to decode it and keep his feet moving at the same time.

He loses himself between streets, coming out knowing the blueprints of the sewers they pass over, but not how Root manages to keep them both upright. He thinks the machine must have some control over his basic motor functions too, because he never actually loses consciousness, just fades in and out as he calmly learns how many switches exist in the subway.

They end up in front of the Chrysler building, and Harold makes himself dizzy looking up at it. He wishes Bear is here with him. Root’s weight on his arm is alien and he’s sure it would bring back memories of her steering him in a wheelchair through a train station if he was able to feel. Instead he knows how many civilians have access to Root’s radios (52%) and how many are in the hands of Elias and Carter’s men and women (48%).

“Where from here, Harold?”

“Inside. Main level. Third hallway. There’s a door to the basement.”

He blinks, and they’re already through, halfway down the steps into the dark. He can see his legs shaking beneath him, but he can’t feel them. He sees John illuminated from the filtered daylight seeping through the open door behind them, a shadow that must be Elias, and Harold’s voice says, “They’re gone now. I made them go away for you.” The words come out flat and childlike. He wants to say he’s sorry, but he can’t.

John doesn’t understand. He can see it in his face, the confusion and hurt and worry. But Root is at his side keeping him upright, and Elias is still in the room, so John waits it out.

Then a second door opens, across the wide open room (a boiler room, with tubes and wires stringing down from the ceiling and up from the floor) and they’re flooded in light again. Grace and Ms. Shaw and Detective Carter spill through it and he hears someone talking, but his brain can’t translate the noise into words.

He speaks, the machine speaks. “I killed them. We’re safe now.” His mouth keeps going; he’s unable to stop it. “445-89-0090, Colonel, 344-40-6331, General.” The numbers and ranks spill out.

He doesn’t tear his eyes from John’s face, watches the slow understanding dawn on him. “Okay,” John says, gently, like he’s a scared child. “Okay. Thank you. You can stop now.”

And Harold knows, feels, the machine’s relief. “Good,” his mouth says. And he closes his eyes, feels Root struggle to take his unexpected weight, and then feels nothing at all.


	10. Chapter 10

Carter leads them to the Chrysler building, which isn’t exactly where Shaw expected Elias to be. She only knows about Elias through his reputation, hasn’t actually had any dealings with him herself. In a city like New York, to be an operator, you had to know the players, and Elias’ reputation was... extensive. It makes a backwards sort of sense to pair up law enforcement with the mob. Together their networks probably cover the whole city, underbelly and legitimate both.

“Elias is down here,” Carter says, and leads them through a back shipping entrance into the building, and then through a maze of hallways that are next to impossible to navigate without indoor lighting. The whole situation has Shaw on edge. She doesn’t like not being in control like this. She doesn’t jump at shadows, but she catalogues all of them. She longs for a tactical flashlight. Grace flutters at her back, a foot behind and close enough to feel, but Shaw works her hand free from Grace’s. “Sorry,” she says, and she is, but she needs both hands at the ready. She needs to be on full alert.

Carter pulls open a door and it swings back to reveal a set of stairs that lead down to a cement floored maintenance room. More than that, it reveals Elias and John at the bottom next to some hulk of an old generator, and Finch and Root propped on a rickety set of metal stairs across from them. Shaw assesses the situation. She can get Grace and herself out easily if it comes to that, Carter too if she needs to. She pulls her gun up and levels it at Root. She could get a shot, but in the dark there’s a risk she’ll wing Finch. Carter has her gun up too.

“What the hell is going on, Reese?”

Reese doesn’t even acknowledge she’s there, and Elias isn’t saying anything either. But Finch is.

Finch is talking, but he sounds off, like he’s just repeating words on some sort of mental loop; there’s no inflection in his voice. Shaw only takes a second to notice the new set of batteries looped around him to decide whatever’s going on with him is not good. He’s sagging against Root, who is only just managing to keep him from hitting the floor. He’s talking about killing people, but Shaw can’t figure out what he means unless he went on a spree after they left.

When John says, “you can stop,” though, it clicks into place. Grace gets it too, she can hear her soft intake of breath, and then Harold is dropping, and only John closing the distance in a heartbeat keeps him from hitting something on the way down.

“It was the machine,” Grace says from behind her, echoing her own thoughts. “It... did that to all of them? How could it do that? How is that even possible?”

Shaw doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of what’s going on, it seems.

“Looks like you won’t need me to find Root after all,” Carter says, and she takes off down the stairs and and falls into place next to Elias. Shaw climbs down to them, can hear Grace just behind her, and keeps her gun out but flips the safety on. She positions herself so she can still see Root and Reese and Finch out of the corner of her eye in the murky light. She half listens as Carter fills Elias in, tuning in enough to hear, “It was _us_?” and, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” and, “what do you mean all the brass is dead?”

“So,” she says to Elias, “wanna talk about what’s going to go down now?” The gun is warm in her hand. She wants to whip it up, to aim it at someone and demand answers, but she keeps it still against her leg.

Elias, who is a lot more average looking and a lot more bald than she imagined, gives a wry smile and flips on a light before he opens his mouth.

Shaw’s mind shorts for a second, because Elias _turned on a light_. Incandescent light floods the basement, bulbs that haven’t been lit since the EMPs hit flutter into life. They flicker, blue-green light that looks so alien now compared to the warm orange sunlight that’s been all they’ve had for so long. She sees double cast shadows for the first time in so long that they read as wrong.

“This. We’ve been working on it for the better part of a week. When the soldiers started defecting after,” here Elias pauses, reinterprets his version of events, “after the command structure was destroyed, we started rebuilding the power grid. It’s small now, only powers this room, but we’ve got another one down at Mercy General that’s powering their generator now.” He’s smug, but Shaw doesn’t care.

She’s speechless. Grace is too, and she’s crying, tears shiny and clear on her face in the light that shines down on them, but she’s smiling.

Elias smiles too. “It’s a long path, but we’re starting to find our way. We can always use more hands, if you want to help out. Who knows, you might like it. It’s the start of a whole new world.”

 

“We’re leaving,” Reese announces. He’s got Finch picked up off the floor and is making for the door at the top of the stairs. He’s pulling back, regrouping, retreating to the library.

“You can come with us if you want,” she offers to Carter as she and Grace pick their way towards Reese. Shaw keeps one eye on Root while Carter shakes her head. Elias is busy plugging something big into the wall, flipping switches must act like rudimentary breakers. He’s going to light up the Chrysler building when night falls. He won’t be able to keep it lit for long, and they’ll blow all their resources doing it, but it’ll be a sign. It will be beautiful, and anyone who isn’t already headed for Central Park will go towards Manhattan like the world’s on fire.

“Now? When we finally can make our move? No. We’re going to march on the perimeter, break down the walls. But let me know if you want a job when this is all through.” Shaw files that away, but she doesn’t want to leave Reese to deal with Root on his own. It’s strange to feel camaraderie. But maybe when the walls are down, when the NY is split open again, maybe then she’ll feel differently.

They bundle Finch up as best as they can and head out of the building. It’s slow moving, and Reese doesn’t let anyone else help with Finch. They move as fast as they can, night is falling, but it takes them a long time.

Root is watching Finch, and Grace is watching Root while they pick their way through the debris.

“You knew this would happen to him.” Grace speaks quietly when she’s the angriest. Shaw has seen plenty of angry people do plenty of angry things, but Grace angry will always throw her sideways.

Root doesn’t look at Grace. “I did.”

“How could you let it do this to him?” Shaw won’t stop Grace from decking Root if it comes to that, and it might. She’s vibrating with quiet rage.

Root does finally look at her. “He used _it_ first,” is all she says.

Reese doesn’t weigh in. He’s still carrying Finch (they have a mile left to go still before they reach the library) and looks about as shell shocked as anyone she’s seen come out of a warzone.

Root has one eye on the radio she’s been glued to and it’s buzzing out a quiet morse code. Enough is enough. Shaw grabs it from her, flips it off, and hangs onto it tight. “Yeah, I think you’re done with that.” And suddenly Root is on top of her and Shaw is pissed she let her guard down enough for the woman to get the jump on her.

Her shoulder collides with the concrete and she narrowly misses rolling onto a broken bottle as Root’s fist flies past her ear.

“No! I need it!” Another punch, this one she can only deflect to her shoulder, not avoid. “Give it back!”

“A little help, Reese?” She rolls left, then right, then right again as she launches to her feet and pins Root on her back. John doesn’t even stop walking, the bastard.

And then Grace is there again, light on her feet and suddenly appearing at her shoulder. Shaw doesn’t know what she expects, but Grace drawing back a fist (tight, wrist straight, thumb out, just like she taught her) isn’t it. Root doesn’t expect it either, and when Grace pulls back, her knuckles are raw.

“You and your machine,” Grace spits, “can go to hell.”

Root’s mouth is bloody. The fresh blood looks unnaturally red against the white of her teeth when she smiles.

No one speaks for the rest of the walk back.

 

They tuck him back on the sofa. If it weren’t for the wireless receiver and batteries strapped to his chest, it’d be like he never left. He’s breathing and alive, which is more than Shaw thought at first. Reese wouldn’t let anyone near enough to touch him during the walk back to the library, and Shaw was half sure he was just carrying a corpse.

“Think he’ll make it?” she asks as she retapes the IV into his hand. He’s paper pale and the shadows under his eyes are purple and dark.

John doesn’t spare her much breath, just grunts.

“I’m leaving,” Root announces as soon as they get Finch settled. She stands in the middle of the library. She’s got another radio now, this one snatched up from a pile on the floor. “John, I asked you to help me, before all this started. You won’t back out on that now, will you?”

Reese still hasn’t spoken. Shaw is about ready to hit him if he doesn’t start soon. They can’t afford to lose both Finch and him too.

He does speak, though. “Go,” he says to Root, quiet and gruff, without looking at her.

Shaw twists, shoves herself between Root and the hallway. “She knows where we sleep, Reese.”

“Let her go. She won’t be back, will you, Root?”

Root smiles at her. Her teeth are still bloody. “I pinky swear.” She sticks out her hand and Shaw waits for a punch, a feight, a rush for the baton she knows is in Root’s pocket. Root stands there, pinky extended, and doesn’t move. “Don’t trust me, Shaw?”

“Please, Shaw?” Reese has never said please to her, or to anyone else, that she can remember. It sounds strange in his gravely voice, stranger still because he still hasn’t gotten up from the floor in front of Finch. He’s kneeling in front of him, has his hands folded on top in a mimic of prayer.  

Shaw looks to Grace. She’s been quiet, shoving scrap materials off the floor to make room for the duffle bag of medical supplies. Grace looks between her and Root, chews her lip, and lets the duffle bag drop with a thump. “Where will you go?” She asks. Shaw can still see the redness of her knuckles. They’ll have to wrap those later; they can’t afford an infection now.

“I need to spread the word of god. The machine is done hiding.” The new radio is already on her hip, flashing instructions and marching orders to her like an absentee commander.

“And Harold?” Root pauses, listens to the beeps that Shaw is parsing simultaneously. But they’re gibberish, ciphered by some extra code she can’t translate on the fly. “What about him? This is all because of you, you and your machine.”

A wry grin, twisting like something alive. Root’s all but glowing now. “Have a little faith.”   

“Go,” Grace says, and Root goes. Shaw itches to stop her, itches to knock her to the ground and leave her tied up in a closet somewhere. But Grace said go, and Grace, she thinks, has the right to make the call as much as any of them.  

 

Shaw is two sections over when Finch wakes up. She and Grace are counting the antibiotics they have on hand after the pharmacy raid and she’s thinking about how to keep infection out of the hole in Finch’s head. It’ll be hard. If Carter and Elias do break through the barricade, if civilization pours back into New York, then they’ll be in a different situation, but Shaw likes to hedge her bets. Grace lets her smear antibiotic cream on her knuckles and they use a roll of gauze to keep them clean.

She hears Finch’s voice, hears a thump that must be Bear leaping somewhere with all 70 lbs of muscle, and Grace goes still at her side.

Grace looks at her, eyes dark. “What if he’s never the same?”

Shaw doesn’t have an answer.

They find him and Reese where they left them. Reese is stripping the gun belt full of batteries and wires off him gently, peeling away layers of tech until it’s just Finch underneath, pale, and sitting upright on the sofa.

“Hello Ms. Shaw, Grace.” He sounds like himself, even though he sounds weak. The parrot voice is gone, replaced with the formal inflections she remembers from before.

“You back to being you?” she asks.

Finch looks at her appraisingly. “I believe the machine has deactivated the implant. I shouldn’t need the connection anymore.”

“You believe?”

He watches her, watches Grace and Reese too. “I won’t lie, Ms. Shaw.”

He lets her check on implant site, lets her test the theory by pulling the wire out. It’s gotten crusty, and sure enough the skin around the plug is red and puffy. She and Reese have hands on his shoulders, but he doesn’t drop when she pulls it out. He sighs, relieved.

“It’s over,” Reese says.

 

Carter and Elias break down the blockade surrounding the city. They hear about it on a broadcast that shouts across the radios, overtakes even the constant morse code that leaks out of them. Something in Shaw breaks too. She didn’t think it would really happen.

She and Grace sit on the stairs of the library, their legs dangling through the gaps in the banister. The sandbags below still barricade off the entrance into the hallway. Finch and Reese are talking quietly not far away, and the sound of their voices, along with the clitter clatter of Bear’s paws as he darts across the floor, fill the silence. It’s the first time she hasn’t heard riots and shouts outside.

Grace speaks first. “They’re going to help Carter and Elias.”

It doesn’t surprise Shaw. “Hm.”

“They’re going to stay.”

She watches Grace now, who watches her. Their hands are linked, and Shaw doesn’t even remember it happening. She still knows where all her weapons are, knows how quickly she can get her and Grace to an exit, knows how far a drop it is from here to the bottom level of the library, and knows they can survive on their own if they have to. She also knows she doesn’t want to. Grace is watching her still and her mouth is soft even with the lines around it.

“What now?”

Shaw smiles at Grace. “We start over.”

 

_End._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3 Thanks for reading everyone! <3 Feedback is love.


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